if you're looking to start or launch a new startup or product in 2025 then hopefully this video is going to help you out if you're new here my name is Ash Moria and I'm the author of running lean and the creator of the one-page business modeling tool lean canvas I've been an entrepreneur for over a decade now and throughout most of that time I've been obsessed with creating a more systematic framework for starting and growing startups I build this framework by battle testing it against thousands of products and I now teach and license it to
do of startup accelerators and universities around the world so in this video I'm going to take my last 10 years of experience from building products and coaching startups and try to condense it into a three-part framework that I would follow if I were building a startup completely from scratch today I call this framework the bootst start blueprint because I believe that every startup should be able to bootstrap their product to paying customers in 90 days or less and I've taught this system to more than 10,000 students over the last 10 years now there are three
levels to this framework if you're at the idea stage of a startup you're going to start with level one level one is business model design or Foundation Building and it roughly takes about 2 weeks to get through this is where you take the big idea inside your head and you start to make it real by turning it into a business model story that you can start sharing with other people if you're starting completely from scratch and this is your first startup then a huge hurdle that holds people up from acting on their their idea is
actually just not getting started on their idea in the first place so what I'd be doing is getting your idea out of your head and sketching out a few business models first the lean canvas which is a tool I created is great for this but I can still feel that it can be Overkill at the stage so I'd recommend starting with something even smaller than a lean canvas something I recently created that I call the leaner canvas the leaner canvas helps you quickly identify who your idea is for where is the best place to start
and what problems to start tackling with a few additional prompts you can then start sketching and stress testing how you will solve this problem what you could charge customers and how you'll position and grow your idea so that it's worth pursuing the answers to these questions help you see your idea more clearly but even more importantly they help you test if your idea is worth pursuing in the first place and if not what simple fixes you can make to make it better I'd recommend sketching up to three of these variations of your idea and then
pitching it to a few friends and potential customers the first challenge with any idea is getting others to see what you see and this is a low stakes way to share the highlevel concept of your idea and get some pretty good insights into whether other people care about what you're trying to build now Perfection isn't the goal at this stage because as with any skill especially in startups it takes time to get good but at least at the start you've made some effort to move your idea forward and start sharing it with other people now
it's through these kinds of conversations that you get to see what others see and move your idea forward for example if you're watching this video right now and you haven't yet started on your idea I suspect that the thing possibly holding you back is probably overthinking you're probably overthinking how to get started how you'll find a co-founder and maybe how you'll find the time to work on your idea all of this overthinking just gets in the way of doing that's why level one is just about sketching those first three business models sharing them with other
people and seeing if they care about your idea because to be honest a startup can easily consume years of your life and before signing up for that you should know if the journey is going to be worth the ride now once you've shared your business models with a few people you'll quickly hit the first fork in the road you'll know if it's something you want to take further and turn into a business or maybe keep as a side hustle or hobby now there's nothing wrong with leaving your idea as a hobby hobbies are good for
tinkering with new technologies and learning new skills but if you're like me and driven to build a business then it's important to recognize that the key difference between a hobby and a business is revenue if you're serious about turning your idea into business then you have to take it seriously and commit to testing not only can you build it but more importantly will enough people care if you're ready to commit you're then ready to go to level two level two is what I call demand validation or sell before you build this is where you test
if enough people will care about your idea enough to buy it before you build it and this is quite different from what most entrepreneurs do at this stage most entrepreneurs at this stage would start with building their product first but this is often a recipe for building too much or building the wrong product entirely because you don't yet know what your customers really want Plus there's the added pressure of how you'll fund your product development you tap into your savings or work slowly nights and weekends or try to raise funding from investors in my opinion
it's still too early to make that choice which is why I recommend setting aside the next 10 weeks or so to First design and sell your product before going all in and committing to build it so how do you sell a product without a working product using a demo cell build approach build a demo not a product and sell that if you can sell the demo why even build the product that's the essence of demo sell build and yes selling a product using just a demo is possible across any type of product category we buy
demos of new products all the time and it isn't just limited to Consumer products even large companies sign Pilots for $100,000 products not after using a working product but after seeing a working demo in fact the more complex to sale the more demos and Discovery conversations play a larger role in the sales process now if you're new to selling like I was here's news for you you have to get good at found or Le sales because no one else is going to come in and do this for you many Founders like myself start off as
artists with a lot of passion for products and product building but if you can't sell your art your art will suffer you have to get good at things like prospecting and setting up calls with potential early adopters running problem Discovery interviews to learn from those early adopters designing and scoping your product to solve just the right problems and then of course pitching and selling and closing your product the good news is that all of these things are learnable skills and if you're willing to do the work that's what I would spend the next 10 weeks
doing and getting good at I would spend the first two to four of those weeks for setting up conversations with potential customers to map the opportunity space and really understand what your customers struggle with this may sound weird but with the right kind of questioning it is possible to understand your customers and their problems even better than they do and once you do that everything else becomes a whole lot easier from there because a problem well understood is half solved once you can nail a musts solved customer problem designing a solution becomes easier setting up
follow-up conversations becomes easier and selling them on your demo becomes a whole lot easier too the goal of level two is designing a solution you know your customers will buy and securing enough tangible commitments from them using tools like letters of intent or pre-orders for your product once you've achieve level two you now have the ultimate choice to make do you go Allin or do you keep this as a side hustle or hobby again if you want to keep your IDE as a hobby that's totally fine but if you're like me you're and more prone
to building a aable and scalable business and decide that you do want to build a business at the stage that is time to go from being an amateur in your startup to turning pro this is when you'll need to decide to go full-time maybe recruit a co-founder and commit to building and launching your product as a professional that takes us to level three which is what I call the 10x launch and growth stage and at this point you need to understand the game of getting to product Market fit up until now we've been trying to
understand your business model and the demand for your business model in level three you get to make your business model Real by turning your idea into a product and driving it to product Market fit and product Market fit ultimately comes down to just one thing making happy customers repeatedly and scalably now making happy customers is not the same thing as making your customers happy you make happy customers by solving their problems repeatedly and helping them achieve better outcomes s all this work happens inside a customer Factory which is a system's way of thinking about the
three activities that go on when you make happy customers they spend more time with your product spend more money with your product and refer you to other people which is the best way to grow and acquire more customers we can map these three activities in the customer Factory into activation retention and referrals now activation is about delivering a great first experience no one is ever going to come back to your product unless you can get them to some meaningful value realization point if you can activate your customers the next step is retention bringing them back
to your product so that they repeatedly get value from your product now activation and retention when put together create what I call the happy customer Loop and this is what you need to First focus on notice that I didn't emphasize Revenue earlier and that is because if you can repeatedly activate and retain your customers Revenue takes care of itself the last and most important lever for growth is the third step referrals once you can create enough happiness in your customers they pay you back two ways first with revenue and then through word of mouth or
referrals now doing all of these things in the customer Factory can get overwhelming which is why it's important to build systems and tackle each of these steps systematically even though we draw the Rocky stick as a smooth curve growth doesn't happen this way it is more like a staircase each step in the staircase requires unlocking a key skill or inside which is why I call level three 10x launch and growth you don't have to tackle all these steps at once with a big bang product launch but you can tackle them in stages and use metrics
and systems to make the journey to product Market fit more manageable now if you've got to the end of this video and you are potentially interested in making 2025 the year of your idea using systems that's exactly what I teach in lean Foundry which is a Founder First Community of over 20,000 Founders I'll be kicking off a brand new cohort on the bootst start blueprint in January of 2025 we have put over 10,000 students to this program and it's got everything you need from tools step-by-step how-tos and live workshops to bootstrap your startup idea in
90 days or less as our mission is to democratize entrepreneurship all over the world we support purchase parody pricing also where we provide additional discounts to people who might need it anyway that will all be linked in the description below so you can check it out there thanks for watching and until next time take care
